It's Like Getting Punched In The Face, But Good

To my horror, on Tuesday my boss came to tell me I had a phone call. Phone calls, in my unit, mean you screwed something up bad and someone is calling to scream at you about it, possibly because their house, car, boat, and/or child was just repossessed. So I flipped out and begged her to take a message and refused to take hold of the handset when she thrust it at me. All the while, as it turned out, the person was not actually on hold. Thanks, Phone Clerk, for being so competent!!!

It turned out to be someone calling from another department. They wanted to interview me on Thursday. Today was Thursday. Today was 150 degrees. I got to take paid administrative time to go to my interview because it's technically part of my job (or so my manager says - and am I really going to question that?) They gave me four whole hours. Sweet!

Now I've been applying to internal postings since my 90-day moratorium was up, which generally means faxing 10 pages of forms to such romantic faraway destinations as Ogden, UT and then never hearing anything back ever. Or, sometimes, you get a little form back in the mail that says you are eligible. Eligible is one step away from qualified, and qualified means you go on the Big List that they may eventually decide to interview off of if they choose to and their funding isn't cut first. But, shockingly, these people are crazy fast and today I got offered a new job.

Surprise!

I am in ubershock. My mother says to just take it. My reasons for hesitating are super lame: (1) I have friends at my job now, (2) taking public transportation enrages me, (3) I'm going to miss out on probably a month and a half of overtime (and consequently not get laid off in September, so you would think the two things would cancel out in my brain, but no.) Also I'm always afraid of hurting my bosses' feelings when I quit, which is totally stupid and irrational and yet inevitably causes me overwhelming guilt.

So I guess I'm going to go ahead and take it. It's in a much, much more prestigious area than the one I'm in now. And I'll get to do tax law stuff, although it's still not a Real Lawyer job. Oh, and did I mention they're going to send me for a week of training in a fabulous sunny southern destination that I have never been to? Oh yeah. That too. F* being a lawyer dude, I want to be a government drone! Woohoo!

Because You All So Care

I got my LLM application in two weeks ago. One of my letter writers wrote down that my deadline was July instead of June though, so it's still not complete. So I should get an answer within two weeks of god only knows when.

In the meantime, I'm trying to decipher the financial aid rules for part-time students. I can't figure out if you can get your whole Stafford loan up to the max limit if you're taking half the courses, or if you only get half for half. It would be so much nicer if I could have all of it, so I'm going to just assume that's how it works until someone comes along and crushes my dreams.

They're telling us at work now that we'll probably be there until at least the end of September. Now I don't want to get laid off, because I can't afford it, but it would be nice if they could pick a freaking date and let us know in advance. And "probably September" doesn't count, because they could come in tomorrow and fire us all effective immediately, or we could be stuck there until November with all our things packed in a box not knowing if we'll be back the next day.

If we are still there once school starts (assuming I get accepted, because why wouldn't I, right? I'm extraordinarily lucky, as you know) it's going to be a big hassle because I want to take one class that would require me to leave half an hour early once a week. Now those of you with human, or even just "human" bosses are thinking "well gee, that sounds reasonable, who would ever deny you that, especially if you have annual leave stored up or agree to come in half an hour early that day?" Unfortunately, I work for an evil soulless bureaucracy, headed, they say, by the Devil himself, and I'm afraid doing anything week after week would constitute an Alteration To My Normal Tour Of Duty, which is a big no-no and punishable by death by firing squad. Seriously. Look it up.

In other news, I'm gonna do me some ghetto weight watchers for a few weeks and see if I can't fit my fat ass back into my cute summer dresses (that are left over from high school, back when my parents paid for everything and I could therefore afford things that one would describe as "cute" and not just "cheap" or "mommy can i give the homeless lady a quarter?" "no dear, she'll only spend it on liquor.") I'm not paying for it, since I'm poor, so I made myself a spreadsheet and decided 25 points a day sounds like a good number. We'll see how that works out. The first two hours have gone well.

Oh, and I also chopped off 12 inches of hair, which I'm supposed to donate whenever I feel ambitious enough to find a padded envelope, and dyed it bright red. I hate it. I went with a friend from work to her sketchass unlicensed ethnic salon (did not know this beforehand, obviously) and feel lucky to have escaped with any hair at all. Not amused. The dye looks cheap and the haircut they gave me has to be blow dried every morning so as not to look like leftover dead rat casserole, which is something I specifically said I could not deal with. Bastards. And this is exactly why I had 12 inches of excess accumulated hair in the first place. So I guess it's back to the drawing board in another two years.